Smoking kills more than 8 million people a year, counting the people who breathe it second-hand. Alcohol adds 2.6 million more. Together they kill more than every banned drug on the planet put together.
And both are legal almost everywhere. You walk in, you pay, you leave. Meanwhile milder substances can cost a person years in a cell.
We treat the word legal as if it means tested, measured, and judged safe. It does not. It only means this drug is allowed.
If the line tracked harm, the two biggest killers would be the most controlled. Instead they are the easiest to buy. The story and the body count point opposite ways.
Alcohol and tobacco were not approved. They were inherited. They were here long before the modern state, braided into harvests, funerals, weddings, and daily life.
By the time anyone counted the dead, the drink and the smoke were already culture. A thing that feels like the furniture of a nation does not get banned. Nobody decided that. It is just how inherited things sit.
Once a state taxes a drug, the state needs that drug. The WHO counted about 361 billion dollars of tobacco tax collected in a single year. That money pays for roads and hospitals.
Now the harm is awkward to admit, because admitting it threatens the budget. The drug that fills the treasury gets a softer law than the drug that fills a smuggler's pocket.
So the map of legal and illegal is not a map of danger. It is a map of history and revenue. It records who organized first, who got taxed, and what was already braided into the culture when the counting began.
Once you see that, the word legal stops being a safety badge. It becomes the record of an old deal you were never asked about.